The Ignorance and Arrogance of Binaries

I apologize for the late newsletter this week.

The family and I were on Spring Break and went to Great Wolf Lodge. It was a blast to go to a water park (even if their business model forced you to pay for literally EVERYTHING lol)

Hope you all have a great and adventure-filled Spring Break as well!

Operating in binaries reveals ignorance and arrogance.

The only way a person can be justified in stating a 100% or 0% confidence in a phenomenon is to amass the entirety of knowledge and experience in that domain.

If it has never rained in a location and someone foolishly states that it will NEVER rain in that location, that person MUST KNOW the future weather patterns for that area will include no precipitation.

This seems obvious and simple when presented this way but the same fallacy can be presented as:

• “He did win there. He will never win here either. He doesn’t have what it takes.”

• “They are evil and immoral and we must do something about it”

• “They’re going to do what you say. They have always done what you’ve said”

(You can still believe in a phenomenon at the extreme ends of the spectrum but call your assurance what it is: Faith)

The Ends Of the Bell

When we operate at the ends of the bell curve, we magnify the minority at the expense of the most likely outcomes.

Basing choices on the fringes disrupts the entire system.

Suppose you believe that a place will never have rain:

• In that case, we may geo-engineer ways to transport water to that area, introducing more moisture but disrupting the native plants and animals who adapted to that climate.

Suppose you believe that a people group will never listen:

• You stop communicating with them and create a self-fulfilling prophecy. They permanently stop listening because you stop speaking to them. (And you probably stop seeing them as human as well.)

Does this mean a minority group or opinion is invalid and should be ignored?

Absolutely not.

But it does mean that the experience of this group, by definition, is not experienced by the majority of the sample size.

Just because a phenomenon doesn’t happen to you, does not mean that it doesn't exist or will not occur in the past, present, or future for a particular group.

It needs to be handled on a specified “minority-case” basis without disrupting the operation of the whole.

This is not the prioritization of a minority but the maximization of the whole.

Simplicity’s Tradeoffs

Avoiding a probabilistic viewpoint of life, as a grouping of likely outcomes, and instead operating under a system of binaries, makes for a simpler life, for better and for worse.

For better:

you only have to make simple binary choices and life loses all nuance, becoming starkly black and white. The right solution will appear immediately and can be chosen quickly.

For worse, your life experience is limited by cold logic and 0 or 1 decision-making. You may be confused as humans are not solely logical beings, prone to emotional decision-making.

Music, art, or friendship can only be justified as tools to achieve an outcome rather than for their enjoyment.

The tails of the curves do not represent real life for the majority but they can't be discounted.

When the minority shouts, we should turn to tell how their experience, while valid, doesn’t represent the experience of the majority but this does not discount what they are experiencing.

But often we:

• Stay silent and ignore them

• Tell them their experience is not real

• Join them on a fragile precipice of minority experience crossing the bottomless chasm of reality.

Binaires as a way of thinking is limiting.

The fringes of the curve cannot control the whole.

In Mastery,

Matthew

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